A transportation engineer has a simple solution to potholes: pave better roads

> Well, a pothole is not just a technological thing, it's also a political entity. Usually we think of European nations as steeped in governmental regulation, and the United States as a free market, but actually the opposite occurs in building roads. In the United States the government sets specifications and asks contractors to meet them. Once done with the road they have no more responsibility.

> Contrast this to France where the contractors must come up with their own specifications and guarantee their work. This means that if a pothole developers the contractor has to fix it. But in the united States, once the job is done, as long as it has met specifications, the contractor is no longer liable.

(Please don't use code blocks for quotations.)

Contractors are pre-approved for their ability to execute.

This technology likely has not been adopted due to difficulty and expense of manufacturing a robust machine and lack of marketing. How many people even knew this solution existed? What is the measurable benefit to paving roads this way? How much does the machine cost vs traditional roller method? All of this work is expensive and there isn't a guarantee of success. While the hypothesis seems reasonable you have to do all the math/science to figure out if this truly is cost effective. Ideas are great, execution is hard.

And there's a snarky comment on page 163 about companies that have to fix roads after ripping them up ("breaking"): if they do condescend to cart anything away it is generally the metal, which they think will come in nicely for the repairs of the trench during their liability for such repairs.

TL/DR: your town engineer just needs to specify the right stuff in the contract, and the road paving companies will just have to adapt.

If you think about it, the same thing holds true for any large, bespoke contract. What you get at the end depends in part on the supervision you put in.

Mostly, I wonder how different the world would be if there was an incentive to build things that don't break.

IMHO that just makes the difference it produces even more impressive, I thought this was a totally different paving machine.

I would guess that the mechanism of action is that water gets through the cracks and erodes the underlayment.

You can impact road surface wear by tweaking any of these variables. They all affected the surface, there is no single cause.

In my experience, both.

Set aside for one moment this new roller, the reality is that road paving is not exact science, and - even if it was - it is largely executed badly.

Paving (and before paving the underneath layers) are more like "cooking" than everything else.

It is not like you have the right recipe, good ingredients and follow "instructions" accurately you can replicate some dishes.

Usually (of course it greatly depends in local uses and materials available) the first mistake is under-calculating the thickness and consistence of the bottom layers (gravel, sand, quarried rubble, sometimes mixed with cement or lime).

The second one (again usually, not always) is inadequate protection from running water (be it coming from rain or from the soil).

Then it comes the exact composition of the asphalt, the (right or wrong) type and quantity of bitumen, the temperature at which it is mixed, transported and layered, the amount of compacting, etc., etc.

In the last 20 years or so some great betterings have come from the use of reinforcing layers, both in the underpavement (woven or non-woven geotextiles) and in the asphalt itself (geogrids, usually plastic).

Whilst geogrids in asphalt are rather costly (both as material and additional work to lay them), high strength geotextiles are relatively cheap and it is surprising how - still today - they are not widely and universally used.

Both however are only good for highways and roads outside the city, as the benefit of these textiles is to spread as much as possible any dynamic action provoked by heavy traffic and loads onto the widest possible surface, but in urban contexts the surface (and up to 1-1.5 m depth) is "ruined" by every kind of duct, pipe, cable and other services, often re-cut (over and over) for maintenance/repair/replacement.

Unless, of course, constituents start making an issue of it with their local representatives :)

Reading this story, maybe the major problem is new technology adoption in government, for an infrastructure project, where measuring better performance takes years.

Each of this processes is long, and conservative, and risky and together they multiplies - so it's really hard to innovate here. And i don't think there are good strategies against that.

This is essentially the case. Asphalt roads as they exist today are basically a really good compromise of all the variables you care about in a road. They are farely durable, are easy to repair, can be laid across various terrains, give good traction, offer a continuous driving surface, shed water farely well, and are realtively cheap. For example cement roads last longer but are not continuous. They have those breaches every few yards that make that obnoxious bump... bump... bump experience. They also have inferior grip.

It's basically the same reason you probably have vinyl windows. Everyone kind of knows they aren't ideal but they are a good compromise of strength, cost and energy efficiency.

You can easily beat asphalt in any one given area but it's hard to do as well across all areas.

Because crappy, like poverty is relative and very much subjective.

Florida native, I can tell you this is very temporary. Big chunks will eventually come up and you can see the previous pavement underneath. I'm assuming that between the heat here and the cracks mentioned in the original article that let water seep between the layers, this is just a bad way to fix a road.

I’m guessing you haven’t flown through Phoenix recently? They have had a runway closed for repaving (might be reopened now) since early January.

Runways are generally concrete rather than asphalt and there are plenty of concrete highways. It tends to be a louder and less comfortable surface to drive on and when repairs do need to happen, they’re more disruptive than a simple asphalt resurfacing. I’m sure there are other reasons to prefer asphalt, but I’m not a civil engineer.

That particular runway was poured in the late 50s or early 60s, and last had major work in the 90s. So it happens, just not on the every-two-or-three-years schedule that it does for roads (or yearly, depending on where you are).

The obvious difference, at least around here, is that runways are made of concrete - lots of it, each batch truckload tested as it is poured (slump tests, anyway), while roads are made from asphalt, as little of it as the DoT will allow, and as far as I can tell, zero quality control testing.

And as somebody else mentioned he can't force others to use his technology.